It is a Monday morning, after a week’s run of Summer and Smoke, and following the example of Tennessee Williams I have just brewed myself a coffee pot of liquid dynamite, and sitting down immediately after breakfast I am hoping its pressure on my heart will stimulate this article. Tennessee Williams was a proud punisher
Regular readers of this column will be aware that I champion small exhibitions which combine judicious selection with sufficient breadth to give an adequate representation of the artist under discussion. With Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610) there is no choice: the fullest retrospective must needs be a small exhibition. An artist who worked slowly, suffered from depression
In 1944 an Allied bomb fell into the circular courtyard of the ancient Roman-inspired house that Andrea Mantegna had built for himself in Mantua, bouncing off its frescoed frieze. It failed to detonate. On 11 March of the same year, another landed on the Eremitani church in Padua, blowing the Ovetari chapel, whose walls were
Dawson Carr is the approachable but authoritative curator of Later Italian and Spanish Painting at the National Gallery. Talking to him you soon sense a total engagement with his work. He was born in Miami and worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 16 years. Armed with a tape recorder I met him
There are many different ways to start a ballet season, but an artistically disjointed triple bill is not the ideal one. Even on paper the Royal Ballet’s opening programme for 2006/7 looks awkward, and the rationale behind joining Balanchine’s Violin Concerto (1972), Jirí Kyliàn’s Sinfonietta (1978) and Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries (1973) remains unclear. Little matters
My friend Mitch rings up. ‘Guess what my album of the year is?’ He is trying to fool me into suggesting Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat, for Mitch and I are both Steely Danoraks of long standing. But I know he was a little disappointed by the album, and he knows I wasn’t. I can’t
Each time I see Shostakovich’s once controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk I am impressed by what brilliant performances it seems to incite, fascinated by it dramatically and musically, but left unsatisfied by its unevenness and what I think is finally its incoherence. As far as productions go, it is hard to imagine that any
The recently concluded Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern was widely appreciated for showing how music influenced the artist’s move towards abstraction. Two concerts featuring seminal compositions by Schoenberg were held alongside talks which explained how abstract forms hit painting and music at about the same time. What was not so fully explored was the blissfully
